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Where were you in 1995? That’s when the first mainstream electronic journal came out – J Biol Chem.

By 1999 ejournals were established and we started to wonder how things could be done better. Harold Varmus at NIH published the Ebiomed proposal. Effectively proposed the adoption of preprints. Was deemed too radical for most.

Evolved into PubMedCentral in 2000 and kickstarted open access in biomedical sciences.

Preprints in biomedicine came of age when bioRxiv was started in 2013.

A preprint is a scientific manuscript uploaded by authors to an open access, public server before formal peer review.

They provide a means of rapid dissemination of research results.

It’s an article but it’s not peer-reviewed.

There are borderline cases.

Some argue that e.g. F1000Research preprints and PeerJ preprints are not preprints because they are associated with a journal. But they are still research papers that have not yet been peer-reviewed.

Wellcome, Gates and others also adopting the F1000Research model.

Cell has started ‘sneak peek’. But these are not open – have to register and login. Not openly licensed. They seem like a wrecking tactic rather than a move towards openness.

The quantitative biology section of the physics preprint server, arXiv, has grown gradually over the past decade. That has computational biology and bioinformatic papers.

Funders Wellcome, MRC and NIH have recently have changed their policies and will now accept preprints in funding applications and reviews; CRUK are currently reviewing their policy. EMBO too.

Institutions Institutions are a bit slower to change, but this is starting e.g. accepting preprints on CVs.

Readers How do you read something that’s not been peer-reviewed? Carefully? Will you offer your comments – on the preprint itself, or on a thirdparty site (PubPeer). You might think to link them to your Publons account?

There’s a couple of sites specifically established for commenting on preprints, in niche areas.